Announcing the Power BI Navigation Preview

On the Power BI team, we spend a lot of time listening to customers who are deploying Power BI within their organization. We are always encouraged to hear stories from customers of how usage of the Power BI service has grown and spread over time – starting with individuals who share reports with others in their teams and growing organically over time.

But we also hear that navigating content gets harder over time as users have more dashboards and reports. Today we’re introducing a new navigation experience available in preview that makes it easier for all users to access their most important content and makes authors more productive. Continue reading for a tour of the new navigation. If you’d like to dive right in, you can learn how to opt-in to the preview today.

A Tour around the New Navigation

We’re introducing a new left navigation bar that makes it easier to access content quickly. With Recent, get quick access to the dashboards and reports you’ve most recently accessed – across all of your workspaces.

My Workspace has always been the place for content sourced either by installing a content pack, publishing from Power BI Desktop, or installing a sample. In organizations where a lot of content is shared, My Workspace can quickly become cluttered with content from others that may or may not be relevant. With Shared with me, we’re introducing a new location for all dashboards that are shared with you by others. You can filter by the owner of the dashboard or search to find what’s relevant and also sort the items by the date it was shared with you. And for shared content you visit frequently, it is even easier to favorite it right from the Shared with me view.

We have also made improvements to way that content appears in your 'My workspace' or Group Workspaces. The content shows up on the main canvas area, with separate tabs for dashboards, reports, workbooks and datasets. Authors also get quick access to the top actions they might want to perform – for example, on the datasets tab, you can now refresh the dataset with one click and see the last refresh and next refresh times right in the list.

You can switch workspaces by clicking on the arrow next to the current workspace name.

Opting in to the Preview

You can opt-in to try the new navigation experience by enabling the Early Access to New Features setting in Power BI. We heard from many of our customers that you wanted more visibility into what’s coming next so you can plan for changes and give feedback. Enabling this setting will give you that opportunity; we’re using it for the first time with the navigation preview and will provide Early Access for other important features in the future.

Turn on Early Access To New Features

Open your Settings menu by selecting the gear icon in the top right corner of your Power BI screen and choosing Settings.

Select the General tab and choose Preview features.

Select the On radio button to try out the new experience. Click Apply.